Allrighty. Since I won't be able to contribute financially to SE, I figured I might as well do some localization work. So I adapted the Portuguese (brazilian) localization for 0.97, changing a few things to make a proper Portuguese (european) localization and adding some diacritics and translations of missing strings in the process. You'll find it attached here.

Next, I'll translate the wiki text on Solar System bodies (already started), and next I'll update the localizadion with 0.97.1 strings.

A couple of things I noticed in the process:

- the planet editor doesn't localize. I'm guessing that's for future versions, but it's weird to have the program partially in Portuguese and partially in English. - there are other details that also don't localize. The most visible of these is the onscreen FPS information. Also, the jounrey log. And more. - although it's said in this thread that if no localized menu images are made the program uses the English one, that's not the experience I had. When I changed to pt-pt, the menus became gray rectangles with nothing in them. I had to copy the brazilian texture and name it ptpt-menu to make it work. - some things come out strangely in Portuguese due to lack of number or gender concordance, which is often irrelevant in English, but not so in Portuguese. "Active" is always "active", but in Portuguese things can be masculine or feminine, hence "ativo" or "ativa". I did my best to minimize this strangeness, but I couldn't get rid of it... nor do I see how one could get rid of it entirely, short of setting up specific strings for every single option.

For this last reason, I may tweak the localization further in the future, but I think that, as far as 0.97 is concerned, this is just about it.

Yes, the common way to refer to variations of the language is as Midtskogen says: pt-pt, pt-br, en-us, etc., which is why I named my file "ptpt". And it's logical: the language is the same, hence the uniform first pt, but the dialect is different (with some limited impact in orthographic rules, like in English), hence the difference in the second "term".

By this I mean that nobody will understand "bzs" (I've never seen it used; the only three-letter abbreviation I've seen for Brazil is BRA, and that's the country, not the language), wereas everyone will understand pt-pt and pt-br, so I disagree with SpaceEngineer here.

Oh, and I just checked that page: bzs is the brazilian sign language, the one used by deaf people. Not the oral and written Brazilian Portuguese.

Actually, the first part denotes the language, loosely defined, the second the region/territory.

For Norwegian, the variation gets turned around:

nb_NO nn_NO

since Norwegian is only spoken in Norway, but there are two different norms for the written language (for historical reasons: one adapted from Danish and one adapted from spoken language).

The exact breakup is not important (there are always cases not fitting the pattern). More important to follow an established practice. It can be argued, though, that the POSIX locale aims to differentiate not only language, but also differences in punctuation, currency, etc, things not relevant for SE.

Well, I don't know for sure what the rationale behind pt-pt / pt-br is, weather it has to do with language variation or territorial variation, but I can say for sure that it is the standard way to refer to these variations in abbreviated form around here. Everybody uses and understands it.

It has the huge advantage, in this modern day and age, of using TLD codes, with which everyone is familiar, so even when people never came across that way to refer to linguistic variations, they understand it pretty automatically.

And here is, attached, the wiki information, properly translated. I kept the file named ptpt, for the time being, until a final decision is reached on this issue.

This is mostly translation of what's available in English, but not only: I also added small sections localizing the names of the Moon and Phobos. Maybe I should do the same with all the other Solar System bodies that have their own names in Portuguese?...

As it turns out, the tweaking came pretty fast. A screenshot SpaceEngineer published today provided context to some of these 0.97.1 strings and I had to make some changes. I also corrected a string too long in 0.97.0 (and 0.97.1) I had missed earlier, corrected a few misspellings I had missed when I adapted the brazilian localization (missing diacritics, basically; stuff like video instead of vídeo) and, since I was at it, I came up with a couple of better translations for other things, one of which should have been rather obvious from the start. I should spank myself. Or maybe not: it hurts.